Rest assured Daphne - I will not be taking all of your suggestions - just the good ones ;-)
Yes - this is a work in progress - and I have scarcely touched the responsive optimisations. Just working on getting the concept and structure right first. On a mobile in portrait I reckon a fractal depth of 5 is about max. On a large hi-res screen I think a depth of 10 may be doable. But few of us are that well researched!
Strangely perhaps, I was not initially designing this for we genealogists - I was designing for our families. I have in mind my grandma, or kids, when they are wondering where Aunt Esmeralda fits in. I want be able to answer that question with the mobile in my pocket. Clutter reduction is critical for a small screen - and so not to overwhelm grandma. But I think the concept might also scale to a genealogist with a big tree and a big screen.
Both the Ancestor fractal and descendant cascade are wholly about orientation within a large and complex family tree - and specifically not about maximising info. That said - I have some ideas about providing much more flexibility for genealogists, but these need a little more code+time. I think I can cover your thoughts about info delivery in the fractal - and would LOVE to hear your thoughts when I get there.
Now to some of the choices in the descendant cascade.
The idea (for my kids) is to be able to open up and compare just 2 branches of descendants from a common ancestor. So we can see our line down from GGG-Grandma, and also see Aunt Esmeralda's line. All on a mobile screen (or tablet at best). A button to "expand all" for genealogists is easy.
Critical to the structure of the descendent cascade is that spouses are presented together and siblings are presented together (close to parents). This is not the case in many other arrangements (compact tree for example). I think this is really important to help orientate within a complex family.
I suspect your development experience might have betrayed you a little. The ▯▯▯▯▯ is a feature not a bug!. The ▯▯▯▯▯ hints that there are 5 children in the next generation. I think ⚬⚬⚬⚬⚬ is probably prettier but the ▯ is more visually similar to what you get if you click. Anyways, this is a finer detail. More importantly the CHILDREN button is too wide and quickly becomes the limiting factor when there are many siblings. Also very importantly, this button needs to be relatively large to make it easy to tap on mobile without accidentally tapping the surrounding person.
Placing the Photo & BDM panels below the Descendant cascade is of course easy. And I think the current arrangement is better for my grandma. But I can certainly appreciate that a genealogist navigating a large structure would prefer to jam as much info on the screen as possible. I think this is definitely doable with the code+time mentioned above.
Daphne - your feedback is very wonderful - thank you. :-)